Hand-scraped wood planks or panels that are typically wood flooring, paneling, or components for wood cabinetry have been produced by hand using a hand scraper 1 (FIG. 1) for some time. Such hand scrapers typically include a first handle 2 and a second handle 3 that extends away from the main shaft 4 of the tool. The second handle 3 is predominantly used to provide the pulling force by the user across the surface of the wood. At the end of the main shaft 4, the hand scraper has the knife head 5 of the scraper 1 attached to it using a plurality of bolts 6 that sandwich the knife between two support blocks. In operation, individuals grasp the tool at the handles and drag the knife head across the wood being scraped while applying various amounts of downward force at various angles and across various surfaces of the wood with each stroke. The process is very labor intensive. As a result, the cost of such hand-scraped wood products is currently very high relative to other wood flooring or paneling styles/products. Nevertheless, despite the high cost of such hand-scraped products consumers still desire such materials for at least their durability and unique appearance due to the randomness of the hand production process. To date, there have not been mechanical devices or systems that have been able to produce wood material, in particular wood flooring and wood cabinetry materials, which have the same randomness of cut, variability of the type of cut, and overall look desired by consumers in the marketplace.
Some prior mechanical systems have utilized rotary cutting tools, such as a router, in an effort to automate the production of wood products that have the appearance of being hand scraped, but the panels produced by such systems are not sufficiently random or sufficiently variable in the type of cut and products produced to mimic a hand-scraped wood product and the products have not been widely accepted in the industry. Other systems endeavoring to achieve this randomness and other qualities and features of hand-scraped wood products have also utilized planers, but these systems similarly do not produce a wood product that is of sufficient randomness or having the overall look of the hand-scraped products. For example, there is no “chatter” portions on such wood products produced using a router system or a planer system and the systems typically do not have the ability to create the angled cuts at different depths and speeds that are achieved by hand scraping a wood material.